Sport England data and facility discoverability — what operators should know

Sport England data and facility discoverability — what operators should know

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Sport England publishes some of the most detailed participation and infrastructure data in European sport. Its Active Lives Survey tracks physical activity across 11 million adults twice a year. Its facility datasets map every registered sports hall, swimming pool, and outdoor pitch in England. For the operators running those venues, that data is often invisible — until it starts affecting your bookings.

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What Sport England's data actually covers

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The Sport England research and data hub brings together several major datasets. The three most relevant to facility operators are:

• Active Lives — a biannual survey tracking how often adults and children play sport and take part in physical activity, broken down by local authority, deprivation band, and activity type. The adult survey covers around 190,000 respondents. The children and young people survey runs to similar scale and is published separately.
• Active Places — a live database of approximately 40,000 registered sports facilities in England, covering indoor and outdoor venues. It is used by local authorities and national governing bodies when planning new provision and assessing existing coverage. If your venue is registered, Active Places holds records of its size, capacity, and activity categories.
• Investment and funding records — Sport England publishes grant data from schemes including the Community Asset Fund. This shows which facility types and geographic areas have received capital investment, and is referenced by grant-making bodies and local commissioners when assessing new applications.

These are public datasets, queryable by anyone. And a growing number of platforms, aggregators, and local authority digital tools use them as a baseline when building maps, dashboards, and search results for sport and physical activity.

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How this data shapes who gets found

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If your sports facility is not listed in Active Places, you are invisible to a layer of planning and commissioning that sits above the consumer booking market. Local authorities use Active Places to assess coverage gaps — which sports are underserved in which wards, which age groups aren't being reached, and where new provision might be funded. National governing bodies use it when allocating development resources. Grant-making bodies reference it when assessing applications.

There is also a more direct effect on day-to-day bookings. Platforms that aggregate local sports venues — including those that handle location-based activity queries — use Sport England's data as a reference point when building coverage models. A facility that is well-documented in the public record is easier to surface, validate, and recommend to someone searching nearby. A facility that exists only inside a booking system nobody queries stays invisible.

Operators who have gaps in their public data record miss referral traffic they cannot see or measure. The enquiry never arrives. The slot stays empty. The customer goes elsewhere.

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The gap between public data and your actual listing

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The problem for most operators is practical rather than structural. Active Places relies on Sport England's local facility planners and on operators themselves to flag changes. If your facility has added a new activity type, extended its opening hours, or adjusted its pricing model, that change is unlikely to reach Active Places automatically. The public record goes stale. So does your discoverability.

This is a known problem, and it is part of why Sport England has backed the OpenActive standard — an open data format for the UK's physical activity sector that lets facility data update automatically rather than through periodic manual submissions. OpenActive-compliant platforms pull live, structured session data from operators' systems, which means any platform querying that data gets today's information, not a spreadsheet that someone updated six months ago.

FMF's data pipeline is fully OpenActive-compliant. When your session data changes — a new class goes on the timetable, a slot sells out, you update pricing for a new term — that change is reflected in real time in any query that reaches our API.

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Where Find My Facility fits

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FMF is not a replacement for Sport England's data infrastructure — we sit alongside it and, in practice, improve the accuracy and freshness of what is publicly available about your facility.

When you list your facility on Find My Facility, your session data — activities, times, pricing, and real-time availability — is published through our OpenActive-compliant API. Local authorities running sport dashboards, researchers querying open data, and consumers searching by activity and postcode all draw on the same feed. Your facility becomes visible to the full stack: the consumer booking market and the broader data ecosystem that shapes local sport investment.

That is the connection most operators miss. Improved public data records do not just strengthen grant applications and planning submissions — they affect every automated query that runs when someone nearby searches for a sport you offer. See how the platform works to understand how your listing data flows from FMF out to the wider ecosystem.

Listing on FMF takes around five minutes, and changes to your sessions and availability are reflected within 24 hours. If you want to check what data is currently published about your facility, start with the Sport England research hub and compare it against what you know to be true. Any gap is worth closing.